Want (Numbered #1, YA Scifi Dystopian) Wattpad Featured Story

Chapter One

Aurelia tugged the tight-fitting uniform shirt down and took one last look into the mirror plate. Her long black hair was tied back, not a stray lock touching her collar as regulations dictated.

She nodded at her appearance, recognisable even in her new uniform. Well, new in that it was different colours from her school uniform; but still, grey and red were a big improvement over the sickly yellow and black she'd been wearing for the last twelve years.

She shivered a little. Her blood still felt cold. It was a side effect of the coding, and she was more than familiar with it. At the end of every school year, the Trackers injected each child with a genetic code update to embed new information into their genes.

For some it was purely because they'd actually passed the year's training; for others it might include distinctions and prizes. For a minority it was the code that signalled they'd failed and training had stopped. Aurelia wasn't sure what happened to these students, since she'd never met any of them again. She assumed they were sent to do some form of low-level work, or possibly even sent back a year to study again. In darker moments she briefly wondered why in her seventeen years she'd never accidentally run across a Failure that she recognised, but it was best not to think about things like that.

She knew the Elitists couldn't read her thoughts; that was forbidden under the Convention, but she was never exactly sure what a Tracker could tell from her twice yearly blood samples, so she did her best to behave herself.

This year's coding had been different, though. Unlike other years when Aurelia had gathered with everyone else in her class on the last day of term, waiting in long lines in the gymnasium, talking and laughing and feeling reckless with freedom and the thought of a whole month of holiday, this year she had bidden goodbye to her schoolmates and skipped the last ceremony. Because she was done. She'd got the news only a few days before.

Whilst traditionally coding was done on the last day of school, when graduating many students waited so that their new employment information could be coded at the same time as their graduation code in the Tracker's office rather than in the school gym. Better to have one injection than two, after all. Aurelia already had her assignment, and dammit if it wasn't a plum one. Exactly what she'd wanted. Wanted for years. Except now, she had a wriggling in her stomach that made her doubt if she was really ready for all of this.

"Aurelia!" Her mom's voice came through the intercom.

"Coming."

She took one last look around her bedroom pod. It would be the last time she saw it. Once she left, the pod would be detached and sent elsewhere, to someone who had been granted the permission to breed, and it would become some other child's home.

When she came home to visit, a guest pod would be attached for the length of her stay. Aurelia took a deep breath. There was nothing here that was hers, she reminded herself. The self-healing skin of the pod meant that there weren't even scuff marks to indicate that someone had been here, let alone childish graffiti. Her belongings had already been sent to the cargo shuttle, so there really was nothing that made this place her own. Except that it had been hers. She sighed, but she was ready to go.

"Coming, Mom," she said again, loudly enough for the intercom to pick up.

She closed the door behind her and took the corridor to the right towards the living pod where she knew both her parents were waiting for her. She'd always called them Mom and Dad, old fashioned terminology that her parents liked, though most of her classmates dispensed with this in favour of their parents' names or simple titles like "Sir" and "Ma'am," depending on how formal their family living situation was.

Her mom looked up and smiled as she entered. "Red definitely suits you better than yellow," she said, nodding in approval. Mom was from City 04, and Aurelia had inherited her Asiatic features and long dark hair. Dad turned from the console he was sitting at and grinned at her.